Analysis of Collective Flow in High Energy Heavy-Ion Collisions in the Relativistic VUU Approach

Abstract

We have calculated the collective flow for collisions of by using the relativistic Vlasov-Uehling-Uhlenbeck (VUU) equation based on the QHD-I model of Walecka. The tensitivity of flow characterized by and to mean field and in-medium NN scattering cross section is studied. It is found that the azimuthal correlation function is reduced dramatically after inserting the collision term and then varies very slowly between NN cross sections from to and reaches the minimum at , while the in-plane mean transverse momentum increases slowly all the way from to . The collective flow is very sensitive to the momentum dependence (indicated by the effective mass ) of the mean field and less sensitive to the compression modulus K and the cross sections from to . The numerical results were compared with the experimental data, and we found that the agreement for both and can be reached with the same set of mean field parameters as well as the appropriate NN cross section in collision terms.